SLUMS IN BRITAIN

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19965, 6 December 1926, Page 9

SLUMS IN BRITAIN

HOMES OF FUTURE EMIGRANTS. MR SAKLATVALA’B PROTEST LETTER TO PRIME MINISTERS. (Press Association—By Telegraph—Copyright.) LONDON, December 3. Mr S. Saklatvala, M.P., is writing to all the dominion Prime Ministers, calling attention to what he calls “the most important of human problems and certain political problems.” He says: “Probably you were not invited to inspect the thousands upon thousands of congested, insanitary British homes in which mothers are giving birth to babies, surrounded in the same room—even in the same bed, by other grown-ups and half-hungry workless children. These are, to a large extent, to be your population in the future. For, pick as carefully as you may, these will form the majority of the British people of the next generation. The fussy nature of some of Mr Baldwin's Cabinet Ministers has just been presented to you as strength, and the ‘Yarmouth Bloater’ character of some of the British Labour representatives placed before you as an index of general contentment among the working class. So you are evidently departing with a safe market in your pocket and a dream of strong, well-developed, conservatively disciplined stream of emigrants whenever you whistle for it. It is my bounden duty to draw the attention of you colonials to the real problems of life, which you ought to have studied with greater care rather than calculating the profits of some imaginary trade.”— A. and N.Z. Cable.